On Saturday 25, we will meet at 1:30 at Schroeder Romero Gallery (637 West 27th Street) for William Powhida's exhibition: The Writing is On The Wall. Bill is an artist, teacher and art critic for The Brooklyn Rail. William will introduce us to the show and talk about his experiences with writing art criticism.
Paddy Johnson (of art blog, Art Fag City) writes:
A testament to the migration of cliche online behavioral norms to the offline world, William Powhida presents an uncensored portrait of the art world from a fictious Thai jail cell, circa September - December 2009 at Schroeder Romero. If you’re part of this community, the show is literally like staring into the sun: you can’t turn away. Hand drawn notebook pages with text on the art world fill the gallery, many of which contain jewels of insider knowledge and reflections on the art world. I spent a good half hour looking at Powida’s, Relational Wall, an annotated watercolor painting depicting virtually every art celebrity in town. “I like to party”, reads the text under Alexis Hubshman of the Scope fair, while dealer Jeffery Deitch sits at the center of the piece. As those in the scene already know, this version of the future isn’t all that different than it is today, but then social economies rarely transform themselves so completely over the course of six months.
On a related note, the exhibition’s press release necessarily references art scholar Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Art, a term identifying works based upon the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt. While appropriate, my hope is that an academic with a better understanding of online culture updates these theories for the fine art world. Powhida’s work may reflect the development of complex social networks lessening our interest in privacy but his mirror is hardly unique. It’s simply one more product in the giant Facebook economy. And even within said marketplace, the idea that this kind of personal information has any lasting or substantive value has been questioned.
William Powhida responds:
Posts
Hey Paddy,
The journal pages in the show come from a possible future for William Powhida after he’s bottomed out in the flailing economy while the relational wall is generally a reflection of the last three years of the art boom. It’s an outcome of Powhida’s forced reflection while sitting in a Thai prison cell. Certainly facebook, which my art dealers are probably scouring right now, has informed the structure of the work, but all the images (including the surrounding wall of prints) are primarily from celebratory art world photographs from Artforum diary and Artnet while all the information is based only on gossip, supposition, and personal knowledge. I included the 2,500 plus portraits (the last 3 years of Art forum Diary) around the painting to suggest that there isn’t going to be much lasting value in most of what the art world takes so seriously. The relational wall is a paranoid, obsessive snapshot of the art world at the height of our inglorious gilded age funded with all that money that disappeared when the stock market nearly halved itself. That money is gone, and may never come back. Certainly not without heavy taxes on the wealthy. Still, I completely agree with you that many of the major players will still exactly be right where they are in the hierarchy with only the supporting characters changing and exchanging roles in a year or even five years and I’ll still be doing whatever it is that I do. My hope, like most of my work, is that it reflects my actual cultural experience during this period. I pulled Bourriaud’s quote because it suggests that the relational wall is Powhida’s self-portrait. Anyway, the game isn’t over, as Bourriaud suggests it won’t start over until the ’social setting radically changes’. That would probably require an alternative to capitalism. I hope the painting didn’t cause any permanent damage.
-Cheers,
William